Before they wrote their new film, “The East,” Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij spent a summer as “freegans” living in tent cities, sharing food retrieved from dumpsters with other freegans, and reusing discarded items rather than contributing to the consumer culture of buying and selling.

After their “Buy Nothing Summer,” Marling and Batmanglij — the two filmmakers behind the indie film “Sound of My Voice” — decided to take their experiences and write a spy thriller about a group of people who live off the grid, by their own rules, who try to right the wrongs they perceive in contemporary society. The freegans, in other words, became an anarchy collective. Their number one target? Corporate CEOs.

In the film, Marling, 29, plays Sarah, a female agent assigned to infiltrate the anarchy collective known as The East. Batmanglij, 31, also directed “The East,” which stars Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page and Julia Ormond. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week to mostly strong reviews. Speakeasy caught up with Marling and Batmanglij after the premiere.

Why the name, “The East”?

Batmanglij: One of the interesting things for me about “The East” is that it’s both the East Coast, which is like something in our American collective consciousness — New England, tony, center of power. The Wicked Witch of the East in the Oz mythology was the bad witch because the book was about how the Midwest was getting screwed over by the east, by Washington. And then of course we have the Middle East or the Far East, which is seen as different or other. The ultimate Other. So, it’s funny that this word means two things, and I thought that was an interesting name for a resistance group that is combined of kids from New England who want to make themselves the Other.

Why did you choose to have The East target corporate CEOs as opposed to say, the government?

Getty Images

Brit Marling (left) and Zal Batmanglij at the premiere of ‘The East’ at Sundance.

Marling: Well it’s funny because one begins to feel in the modern day that the real seat of power doesn’t feel with the government anymore. Multinational corporations are outside of the purview of any nation-state. These are the entities that are shaping and running the world. As we’ve seen recently, the complete collapse of the economy, the things happening in the environment, the BP oil spill – we started writing the script and all these things started happening later. The story we were writing just kept becoming more and more prescient. The modern anarchy movement is about rebelling against the corporate structure. About seeking to hold an entity that literally because of its design, which is limited-liability, means nobody’s responsible, nobody’s accountable. The anarchists want to hold them accountable.

The East targets a pharmaceutical company that produces a drug with harrowing side effects. Was that inspired by a real-life event?

Batmanglij: Well, we just kept hearing about stories of people devastated by these drugs. Even today there’s talk of what are the side effects of these drugs? No one even knows the long-term side effects. If antidepressants can literally chemically alter your mood, what else can they do? I was watching some TV ad for some drug that makes you not smoke. You take it and it makes you not smoke, but it was causing all these people to commit suicide. If one person committed suicide from a drug they took to stop smoking, it’s the saddest story. It’s the saddest place we’ve ever gotten to.

Did you consider having The East do a jam [a targeted attack] on banks, given the financial crisis?

Marling: We did consider that. It’s tricky because what’s so amazing about “The East” and I think why this film works is they think very emotionally. They’re an emotional group of people and they’re trying to create emotional, provocative visual images and storytelling to connect with people.

Batmanglij: But it’s also borne out of the story. We didn’t just come up with jams that we thought were interesting. Doc [a character] is upset with Big Pharma for very specific reasons. The jam itself will have an emotional resonance and that’s why they put it online and it goes viral in the story, also they choose to do that jam, they don’t choose their jams arbitrarily. They choose to come together to help a fellow man who’s been hurt. Thumbs [another character] doesn’t have a jam but in the story world we created he does have a jam. Thumbs is a vet of the wars in Afghanistan, so there’s a jam against the manufacturers of the weapons and planes, so that would’ve been something we could’ve done had we had a longer movie.

[SPOILER] Does Sarah in the end actually become softer than Benji, the de facto leader of The East? During the entire movie she’s fighting to stay tough, but she seems to be the softer one in the end because of how she would handle the list.

Marling: That is the most beautiful thing that I think has been said about the movie. I think that’s so lovely. I always thought that was such a nice line, I don’t even remember when we came up with that, when she says, “What, you think I’m not tough enough for the truth?” And he’s like, “No, I think you’re not soft enough.” Yeah, I think at the end of the movie, she’s finally gotten back in touch with this softer side of herself, which I think for women in particular is really hard to live with. It’s a very masculine, aggressive world that we’re in right now, separate of even what gender you are. It’s just the direction of everything. To be a woman and navigate that space, you often see women letting go of their more feminine qualities in order to survive and thrive. I think Sarah’s journey is the opposite. I think she does come into a sensitivity that she always had that was very connected to her spiritual side. And I think what she does with that list is up to the audience’s imagination in some sense. How far she could go with it given all that she knows and sees now, and being the person that she is, which is a pretty brave, tough, radical girl.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.